Quote

A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.

Thornton Wilder

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Action
Believes
Human
Event
Humans
Theatre
Made
Theater
Believe
Beings
Dramatist
Pure
Arresting
Events
Involving
Upon
Comment

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
Thornton Wilder
Image
How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?
Thornton Wilder
Image
The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
Thornton Wilder
Image
If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well.
Thornton Wilder
Image
All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
Thornton Wilder
Image
When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery ... He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift.... There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.
Thornton Wilder
Image
When you're at war, you think about a better life when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.
Thornton Wilder
Image
The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
Thornton Wilder
Image
He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.
Thornton Wilder